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Born in the Bronx on June 12, 1954, Donald Revell is a graduate of SUNY-Binghamton and SUNY-Buffalo. His first collection of poems, From the Abandoned Cities, was published by Harper & Row in 1983.

Since then, he has published several collections, including: The Bitter Withy (Alice James Books, 2009); A Thief of Strings (2007); Pennyweight Windows: New And Selected Poems (2005); My Mojave (2003); Arcady (Wesleyan, 2002); There Are Three (Wesleyan, 1998); Beautiful Shirt (Wesleyan, 1994); Erasures (Wesleyan, 1992); New Dark Ages (Wesleyan, 1990); and The Gaza of Winter (University of Georgia Press, 1988).

He has also translated two volumes of the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire: Alcools (1995) and The Self-Dismembered Man: Selected Later Poems (2004), both from Wesleyan.

Revell's essays have appeared in The Art of Attention: A Poet's Eye (Graywolf Press, 2007) and Invisible Green: Selected Prose (OmniDawn, 2005)

His honors include a Pushcart Prize, the Shestack Prize, the Gertrude Stein Award, the PEN Center USA Award for poetry, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the Ingram Merrill and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial foundations.

Editor of Denver Quarterly from 1988-94, Revell has been a poetry editor of Colorado Review since 1996. He has taught at the Universities of Tennessee, Missouri, Iowa, Alabama, and Denver. Since 1994, he has been a Professor of English at the University of Utah, where he serves as Director of Creative Writing.

Revell currently lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, with his wife, poet Claudia Keelan, and their son, Benjamin.

Vietnam Epic Treatment

Donald Revell, 1954

It doesn't matter
A damn what's playing—
In the dead of winter
You go, days of 1978 -
79, and we went
Because the soldiers were beautiful
And doomed as Asian jungles
Kept afire Christ-like
In the hopeless war
I did not go to in the end
Because it ended.
The 20th-century?
It was a war
Between peasants on the one side,
Hallucinations on the other.
A peasant is a fire that burns
But is not consumed.
His movie never ends.
It will be beautiful
Every winter of our lives, my love,
As Christ crushes fire into his wounds
And the wounds are a jungle.
Equally, no matter when their movies end,
Hallucinations destroy the destroyers.
That's all.
There has never been a President of the United States.
And the 21st-century?
Hallucination vs. hallucination
In cold battle, in dubious battle,
No battle at all because the peasants
Have gone away far
Into the lost traveler's dream,
Into a passage from Homer,
A woodcutter's hillside
Peacetime superstition movie.
On a cold night, Hector.
On a cold night, Achilles.
Around the savage and the maniac
The woodcutter draws a ring of fire.
It burns all winter long.
He never tires of it
And for good reason:
Every face of the flames is doomed and beautiful;
Every spark that shoots out into the freezing air
Is God's truth
Given us all over again
In the bitter weather of men's
Hallucinations. There has never been
A President of the United States.
There has never been a just war.
There has never been any life
Beyond this circle of firelight
Until now if now is no dream but an Asia.

From Pennyweight Windows: New & Selected Poems, Alice James Books, 2005. Used with permission.

From Pennyweight Windows: New & Selected Poems, Alice James Books, 2005. Used with permission.

Donald Revell

Born in the Bronx on June 12, 1954, Donald Revell is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including My Mojave

by this poet

A jet of mere phantom
Is a brook, as the land around
Turns rocky and hollow.
Those airplane sounds
Are the drowning of bicyclists.
Leaping, a bridesmaid leaps.
You asked for my autobiography.
Imagine the greeny clicking sound
Of hummingbirds in a dry wood,
And there you’d have it. Other birds
Pour over the walls

Sha-
Dow,
As of
A meteor
At mid-
Day: it goes
From there.
A perfect circle falls
Onto white imperfections.
(Consider the black road,
How it seems white the entire
Length of a sunshine day.)
Or I could say
Shadows and mirage
Compensate the world,
Completing its changes
With no change.
In the morning after a

They all wore little hats
Vermont that I
Can see, the river its coronet
Of yellow beetles—crawling,
Flying—the flowers wearing
The river for a hat.
I can see that
When I stand alone
Upon this acre as now
Sober and living, the same, the same.
They wore:
Hats.
They are not dead,
John and Johnny and John,
Which